• axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    84
    ·
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    I’m more confused about the confusion surrounding Skibidi Toilet than the thing itself. How is it confusing? Millennials already saw this kind of thing. This video is from October 2007 for example. Also all those weird animations on Newgrounds, people like Tom Green, the entire “random” fad from 20 years ago. Now I’m feeling all wistful and nostalgic for Salad Fingers. Those were good times honestly, felt like internet creativity was more organic back when there wasn’t any money to be made

    It’s just some surreal animations with Half-Life 2 assets, right? I’ve been seeing stuff exactly like it for over half my life now. If anything I think it’s cool that there’s still life surrounding Half-Life 2 and Source engine stuff. lot of good times with those communities

    also from my understanding a lot of popular slang that’s considered gibberish (gyatt, rizz, cap, simp, etc) is just repurposed NYC/Chicago/Atlanta black slang that’s been around for decades

    • berrytopylus [she/her,they/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      36
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      Also the internet throws a lot of our traditional understandings of culture out the window. A 20 year old and a 40 year old might not have had as much reason to hang out before (although things like sports and hobbies did pull age groups together some) but now they’re all playing against each other in the new Call of Duty, sharing memes about Among Us, laughing about how they’re too old for the Skibidi Toilet and arguing on Twitter.com

      There’s lots of injokes and references and slang that I don’t understand not because of my age, but because I don’t watch Streamer X or play Y game or have Z streaming service. And yet plenty of people younger, my age, and older will get those references because they do. Meanwhile the opposite is true, I’ve played some online games from my childhood with kids who weren’t even alive when the game came out! It was kinda shocking really.

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        26
        ·
        11 months ago

        My hypothesis is that there’s only school-work-retirement as actual generational/cultural boundaries. People in school have different memes because they all see each other every single day for hours at a time, people who work for a living have different memes because they struggle to find time to see each other in person, and retired people have different memes because they’re bored.

      • invo_rt [he/him]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        23
        ·
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        injokes and references and slang that I don’t understand not because of my age, but because I don’t watch Streamer X or play Y game or have Z streaming service

        Very accurate. I work in a very young office where most of the employees are in their early to mid 20s. We’re generally all nerds to some degree, so we play a lot of the same games and see a lot of the same movies, but my biggest knowledge gap is around whatever is trending on TikTok and whatever happening is going on with some streamer or youtuber. But on the other hand, I watch some things targeted for their demo that they haven’t seen.

        Like most memes though, it’s related to what content you’ve consumed. I haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3 yet, but most people at my work have. They joke about it and I’m just the dude standing in the corner at the party thinking “They don’t know I optimized my science lab loop in Factorio.”

      • Great_Leader_Is_Dead [none/use name]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        12
        ·
        11 months ago

        A 20 year old and a 40 year old might not have had as much reason to hang out before

        Eh, I feel like this ain’t quite the case if you’ve worked in the service industry. You got a lot of 30 year old shift managers shooting the shit with 20 year old cashiers while closing shop up. Seriously me and the 19 year old punk I work with have been doing our own Cum Town bits while mopping the floors for months no.

    • SexUnderSocialism [she/her]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      30
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      Yeah, this is all just similar to the memes we millennials experienced during the 2000s and the early days of YouTube. There’s nothing alien about it. The fact that stuff like Source Filmmaker and Garry’s Mod is still alive and well is pretty cool.

    • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      25
      ·
      11 months ago

      Yeah I was like “I have no idea what skibidi toilet is Gen alpha weird as fuck” for a while then I actually saw one and I was like “Oh it’s just source filmmaker bullshit like when I was in middle school”

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      10 months ago

      I would argue that there’s clear difference between the video you showed and Skibidi Toilet. For one, your video is from a time on Youtube when “random images/clips are shown while unfitting music is being played in the background” was a genre. So it has more in common with this or this than modern Youtube videos or even YTP. Seriously, “something something while I played unfitting music” was its own genre way back in the day. The only real difference is your video uses the Source engine, which survives in modern Youtube.

      Skibidi Toilet and all that body horror shit like Aaron Animations are also far too dystopian for early Youtube. Going by tone alone, I would peg the video as a post-2016 creation, which wasn’t when the first Skibidi Toilet video dropped but was the time when the channel started and had this video, their most famous video pre-Skibidi Toilet. And it’s pretty obvious the dystopian feeling comes from living and reacting to a post-Great Recession, post-2016, post-2020, “post”-Covid world.

    • Great_Leader_Is_Dead [none/use name]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      11 months ago

      I think a lot of this kind of shit you’re seeing now is meant to be tongue and cheek. I see a lot, myself included, of millennials joking about being “old” now, see the resurgent popularity of that one Simpsons clip that like five people in this very thread have been posting. It seems mostly good natured, the 20 somethings are turning 30 now and they don’t feel hip anymore and are having a laugh about it.

    • Tripbin [none/use name]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      10 months ago

      Early 30s and watched the first one for first time yesterday. Reminded me very much of the kind of stuff I’d like when I was younger. Then I skimmed through to some middle episodes and saw it had some kind of story and a really weird surrealist feel that I was really digging. I doubt I’ll ever sit down and watch all of it (can only take so much of that song) but I can absolutely see the appeal. I love surrealist stuff.